Scarlet Dream. James Axler
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again?” Grant asked.
But Brigid was already sprinting across the room, rushing behind the truck as it picked up speed. Grant glanced to his left and saw Brigid running onward deftly avoiding the shambling undead figures as she hurried toward the closed doors of the goods elevator.
“I figure we have only one exit,” Brigid explained over the Commtact, but before she could continue Grant cut her off.
“I gotcha,” Grant assured her. “Be there in a tick. Kane,” he added, alerting his other colleague. “You might want to duck down.”
“Roger that.” Kane’s voice snapped back instantly, not bothering to question his best friend’s left-field advice.
Grant was at the wall to the office then and he slammed on the brakes as the truck smashed through the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass. He saw Kane leap back just in time as the glass shattered all around him, twinkling shards surging across the office like some beautiful, man-made tidal wave.
The truck slapped into the corpse wielding the walking stick like a weapon, knocking him flying in an instant, and its front tire bumped over another before it came to a halt, chairs, desks and office debris toppling in front of its hood.
Commanding his Sin Eater back into his palm, Grant snapped off a quick burst of covering fire from the truck’s window as Kane vaulted over a dust-caked desk and scrambled toward the waiting vehicle. A moment later Kane had clambered up into the high rig, the figure with the dreadlocks lunging after him.
“What kept you?” Kane asked breathlessly, delivering a swift back-kick into the grasping corpse woman’s chin.
“Traffic,” Grant replied, working the gearshift into reverse and pumping the gas.
A moment later the Army truck was hurtling backward across the hangar bay, rotten rubber tires screeching on the metal decking as Grant wrestled with the wheel. They hit something behind them, and Kane leaned out of the window, peering to see what it was. A stack of crates toppled over, and two undead corpses were knocked from their feet. Ezili Coeur Noir watched, well away from the path of the rushing vehicle.
Over by the elevator, Kane spotted Brigid jabbing at the control panel with her free hand as she sprayed staggered bursts of bullets at a half-dozen undead men who threatened to overwhelm her. With a cheerful chime that seemed utterly out of place in the nightmarish surroundings, the elevator arrived, its jawlike metal doors sighing open while Brigid’s sweeping bullets knocked another zombie off his feet.
Grant’s foot pumped the brake, and he gripped the steering wheel as the truck threatened to go into a skid on its bald flat tires. As the vehicle screamed across the metal it knocked three corpse figures from its path, but there was no time for celebration. Brigid Baptiste leaped aside as ten tons of truck hurtled past her and crashed hard into the edge of the open elevator, metal-on-metal kicking up a lightninglike burst of sparks. As the truck drew to a stop, its left side flush with the wall of the goods elevator, Brigid rushed into the elevator cage and jabbed at the control panel with the heel of her hand. In front of her, the doors began to close on their pneumatic motors as several undead figures struggled from the floor toward the fleeing Cerberus team.
Behind Brigid, Kane had jumped down from the cab and was adding bursts of gunfire from his own weapon to hers as she fended off the approaching figures until the shining metal doors finally closed. As they did so, Brigid let out a long breath. “What on earth…?” she asked.
“RWI077-093-d,” Kane replied, flexing the tension from his shoulders as the elevator shuddered and began to rise.
“What does that mean?” Brigid asked him, baffled.
“It was the code on the file that crazy-looking woman was studying,” Kane told her. “She called herself Ezili Coeur Noir.”
“Ezili of the Black Heart,” Brigid said in translation. “Voodoo loa, the spirit of death.”
“No.” Kane shook his head. “That’s no voodoo spirit.”
Brigid looked up at Kane querulously as she discharged the near-empty clip from her TP-9 and loaded a fresh one. “No?”
“Don’t ask me how,” Kane told her, “but that there—that’s Lilitu, Annunaki dark goddess and royal pain in the ass.”
Brigid’s eyes widened as she stared at Kane, utterly dumbfounded.
Chapter 6
In her guise as dark goddess of the Annunaki pantheon, Lilitu had been manipulating humankind almost from the day that she had first emerged from the water and begun to walk on two legs.
Her story had been told in a hundred different ways across the different religions of mankind, where she had been Lilith, Lilu and even the Queen of Sheba who seduced wise King Solomon. The ancient Sumerian records cast Lilitu as a terrible harlot-goddess who reveled in the extremes of carnality. As Lilith, Lilitu was reputed to sexually take men by force as they slept, and in Talmudic lore she was believed to be the first wife of Adam.
While mythology was often mired in interpretation, it was clear that Lilitu was a shrewd and ruthless manipulator with a sadistic streak. Thousands of years ago, when the Annunaki had first walked the Earth, Lilitu’s family holdings had become a sprawling empire near the Red Sea. Wishing to acquire the territory, Overlord Enlil had wed Lilitu in a pact that had resulted in betrayal and usurpation. Thus, Lilitu had embarked on a millennia-long war with the Annunaki Supreme Council, a sprawling game of chess with humanity as pawns. And so Lilitu was rightly renowned for her utter ruthlessness, the possessor of a callous streak that recognized no limitations.
Several years ago, Lilitu had emerged from her chrysalis state where she had hidden for ninety years in the guise of Baroness Beausoleil, ruler of her own self-named ville in the Outlands. She had caused trouble for the Cerberus rebels—both as Baroness Beausoleil and in her true form—since almost the day of their inception.
However, although she had assumed many forms in her near-immortal lifespan, the last time the Cerberus rebels had dealt with Lilitu she had been in her true body, a graceful humanoid goddess with a snakelike aspect to her crimson-scaled skin and black-vertical-slit yellow eyes, a magnificent crest atop her skull.
Less than a year ago, the Cerberus team had dealt what had appeared to be a final, decisive blow against the Annunaki’s mothership, Tiamat. During the scuffle, Lilitu had been shot—and apparently killed—by her brood sister Rhea, and her corpse had still been aboard Tiamat when the magnificent organic spacecraft had been destroyed in an almighty fireball. Kane, Brigid and Grant had seen that with their own eyes, and yet they knew that the Annunaki had a nasty habit of surviving even the most dire and absolute of circumstances.
Kane climbed back into the cab of the artillery truck as the elevator doors opened in front of them, and he shot Brigid an inquisitive look. “You going to say anything, Baptiste?” he asked. “Or are you just going to let your jaw hang like that until the wind changes?”
Brigid Baptiste brushed a lock of her red-gold hair behind her ear as she finally spoke, now seated between Kane and Grant. “Lilitu,” she said, as if quite unable to comprehend what Kane had said. “That…thing…was Lilitu?”
Kane nodded. “I think so,” he said. “She’s been through a few changes.”
“A few changes?” Grant repeated, amused. “She looked awfully dead, my friend.”
Placing his hands on the steering wheel, Grant pushed down gently on the accelerator and the truck idled out of the elevator as the doors opened to their full extent, a long, ill-lit shaft yawning in front of before them. As the truck rumbled along a few feet, motion-sensitive lights popped on overhead, lighting a little more along the wide tunnel. In the flickering lighting, the three Cerberus teammates saw they were in a gray-walled corridor that angled upward toward the surface. The corridor was wide enough to accommodate the truck twice over, and as they watched the lights pop on ahead of them, the team became aware of dark figures lurking in the shadows. These